2025.10.24: Books that were formative for me

2026-01-02 01:11 by Ian

We are each our own worst judges, but I'm nearly certain that I'm strange. Some people that have been close to me have occasionally been so bold as to ask me why. Presuming my answers are worth anything at all, here is a short list of the books that have helped made me what I am.
In no specific order, but grouped topically...

Should I trust mathematics?

Tobias Dantzig - Number
What is the ontological status of numbers? Do they exist independently of our minds? This book is a brief history of numbers. It was a perfect grounding before I read...

George Lakoff, Rafael Nuñez - Where Mathematics Come From
None of my math education ever inspired me to ask about the underpinnings of math, nor attempted to address the very simple question "are we inventing math, or discovering it". This book does, and made me a much better math teacher. I'm still not sure if the subject matter is mathematics, or psychology. Covers the genesis of calculus, and ends with an analysis of Euler's Identity.

What am I?

Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
Biology is not a discipline of null interest. It underpins everything we are, and gives rise to anything that might be studied by psychology. While one may take issue with evolutionary psychology, to not even be aware of it is akin to taking on linear algebra without having mastered the rules of arithmetic: hopelessly lost without guidance. This book should be required reading for graduating high school. It is heavy, but not hard to understand, and provides an excellent introductory framework for understanding humans (and thus, yourself). Closes with an examination of the humanitarian disaster that we call the 20th Century.

Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works
A somewhat more technical introduction to evolutionary psychology, with a firm anchoring to the individual. Pairs well with The Blank Slate, can be taken alone.

Stanley Milgram - Obedience to Authority
The world would be a much different place were it the case than baseline humanity didn't have the cognitive exploits circumscribed by this study. In my opinion, it should be mandatory reading for graduating high school. It is short, dark, and a powerful immunizing agent that will harden anyone who reads it against coercion from anyone who presumes to be in authority.

Gerald Edelman - Wider Than The Sky
Most smart people I've known have been curious at some level about the underpinnings of specific facets of their own (and perhaps others') minds. This book is a good non-specialist introduction to the consequences of having (as mammals do) a bicameral mind.

Antonio Damasio - Descartes' Error
So named because of the unintentional poisoning (by mind-body dualism) of human attempts to understand our own cognition. Specifically, the role of emotion in decision making. This book started me on an independent study of neuroanatomy, and unconfused much of my reasoning about my own thought processes.

Antonio Damasio - Universe of Consciousness
A far more technical elaboration on the ideas of Descartes' Error. This book would be an excellent read for anyone with an interest in neural networks, generally. Covers topics of self-organization.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
Such florid language as Rand emitted is not typically my taste. I usually prefer authors that are plain and concise, but Rand was an exception for me. I was fortunate to have read The Fountainhead in my early 20s. It is one of the few fiction books that I've re-read more than five times. No other book I've read has made me feel not so alone. It is also an excellent NPC filter. If all someone remembers about the book is the rape scene, the book wasn't written for them.

How did all of this come to be?

James Gleick - Chaos
I've forgotten more mathematics than most people learn in a lifetime. Even so, none of it would have prepared me for modeling nonlinear dynamic systems as well as this book did. Reading it kept me out of the "climate change" hysteria that persists to this day, and made the real world far more comprehensible. Being as it is parsimonious on the math, it should be completely understandable to everyone who passed algebra. For a book to be all of that and also be entertaining to read is utterly unreasonable to expect. Yet this book delivers. I continue to lean on it to this day.

Stuart Kaufmann - The Origins of Order
This may be the hardest book on my shelves. It is a textbook, and assumes specialist-level knowledge of biology, chemistry, and mathematics to take much from it. As Kauffman himself says, "Thermodynamics is incomplete". It does not account for the information content in complex systems, and how that content builds complexity from simple systems. This is the best effort for explaining such things as I've encountered. If the content is too difficult, he also wrote a distillation of the ideas into a shorter book (in narrative form), called "Investigations".

Miscellaneous

Shell Silverstein - The Giving Tree
If you were lucky enough to have a mother of such quality as mine was, this will make sense to you without further explanation. I miss you, mom.

Scott Adams - God's Debris
A short modern re-framing of the "Three O's Paradox" packaged in a surreal piece of fiction. Well worth the few hours it took to eat.

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